SMA267701: Consider different implementation of WebTemplate

The custom WebTemplate describe the provisioning process of a site in XML and SharePoint provision the artifacts.

A WebTemplate is deployed via Full Trust Solutions (WSP) to a SharePoint farm and typically contains 2 XML files which are deployed to the SharePoint file system.

The provisioning is managed outside of SharePoint. All artifacts are deployed via CSOM to SharePoint.

A custom provisioning engine (e.g. with Powershell, external webservices or client applications) manages the creation of sites and applies changes via CSOM.

This is a critical blocker for migrations because SharePoint content (such as team sites) is based on a custom site definition and cannot be migrated easily.

In a migration from SP 2010 to SP 2013 (if the target 2013 environment allows custom WebTemplates) the 2010 WebTemplates often cannot be used without changes because they keep using 2010 features and may look like 2010 sites in a 2013 environment (with the limited feature set). Additionally some SP 2010 features are no available in SP 2013.

In SharePoint Online and in Office365 WebTemplates are not available.

If this custom provisioning process is established and WebTemplates are completely avoided, all content and sites can be easily migrated to other SharePoint environments. Remapping the stapled features of SharePoint Out of the Box features in a WebTemplate can be very costly in development time.

New templates can be deployed without downtime for SharePoint because no WSP deployment to SharePoint is necessary. Only the site provisioning component needs to be updated.

The backup/restore of a site is independent from deployed WSP solutions which reduced the complexity of a backup/restore process.